Riding the Black Ram: Law, Literature, and Gender
- Author / Editor
- Heinzelman, Susan Sage.
Riding the Black Ram: Law, Literature, and Gender
- Published
- Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Law Books, 2010.
- Physical Description
- xxv, 168 pp.
- Series
- The Cultural Lives of Law.
- Description
- Heinzelman examines the interdependencies of literary and legal discourses and the representations of women in them, seeking to define the development of the novel as a stage in the separation of the two discourses. She reads various French and English novels in this light and presents MLT and WBT as a pairing that anticipates the dynamic of legally affirmed normative behavior and reaction to it. The Man of Law seeks to replace unruly fantasy through law and hagiography, but the Wife responds by reinvesting romance with magic that is equated with the female body. The juxtaposition of the two Tales affirms that contrary narratives interact in ways that evoke ethical responses.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Man of Law and His Tale
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale